A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

He seemed not to notice the strain I was under. “They have told her she is to be married to a young man whom they have chosen for her. She is unhappy, but cannot tell them. Now they are making many preparations. Maria Dolores spends her time with her mother, sewing dresses and packing them away. Then her mother speaks to her of things that frighten her and me, things that seem to happen when men and women are alone at night. She does not understand and lies awake when her mother has gone, afraid and wondering. We are uneasy, Maria Dolores and I.”

  Here, Novna, I must attempt to explain the marriage of Earth people. While with us marriage is the spiritualized union of masculine and feminine natures in one soul, it is to them a more concrete thing. Their junction is not only one of minds, but one of bodies as well.

  The union seems not to be unpleasant for those who take part in it, but for us, who so jealously guard our bodies from another’s touch, the marriage of Earth people is difficult to contemplate without revulsion.

  I was rescued from having to answer Gven by the laughter of Corven, who had overheard the last of the poet’s words. “Well then, poet, if she is unhappy, you must take her away, mustn’t you? That’s what you want, it seems, to take her away to Hainos and make her your Gvna.”

  Gven stood up and glared angrily at Corven. “Would it be so bad a thing to carry back one person of Earth? Why shouldn’t we?” he flung at the other man.

  Corven turned away in disgust. “You know we have no authority to intervene in their affairs. This is what comes of letting a poet-priest meddle in the concerns of science.”

  A sullenness came over Gven’s face, and he withdrew from us again, turning back to the panels. I knew he was with Maria Dolores. Though I was uneasy over his ignorance, I could not help feeling relieved that I had not been forced to enlighten him.

  My anxiety proved to be well-founded. It was only a few weeks later that we reaped the results of our long-cultivated conspiracy of silence against the poet-priest. We were deeply engrossed in our work at the computing tables when our nerves were shattered by a cry of anguish from the mind of Gven. In a moment we were standing around him, avoiding each other’s eyes and scarcely daring to look at the man shuddering before us, his face in his hands.

  “It is done.” Gven cast his anger at us like a stone. “It is as though she had been killed. Why couldn’t you tell me? You, Noven, I asked you. Why couldn’t you have spared me this?”

  The men looked uneasily at me and back at Gven. Shaken, they drifted away, back to their work, still ashamed to meet each other’s eyes. Gven sat there, grinding his fist into his palm, staring straight ahead.

  He has been gone for some time now. At his request, a long-ship stopped for him on its homeward cruise. I have not tried to reach another subject, nor have any of the others. At least, if they have, they do not speak of it. We are reluctant to attempt any communion with these creatures whose alien nature has been so strikingly demonstrated to us. The game of Observation itself has become less a game, and we go about our work with a vague sense of unrest, as though the descent of catastrophe upon us were imminent.

  Gven gave us one last gift before he left. He sang us a song that made us want to bend our heads to the ground in shame. If his songs are bitter now, and if there is no innocence in them, one needs not look far to find the reason. END

  SENDOFF

  Robert Presslie

  The whole street turned out for Willy’s sendoff.

  From end to end it did not measure much more than half a mile but in its short length there was a representative selection of all humanity. It ran east and west, and the east end was so many yards nearer sea-level that almost any winter the houses at the foot of the steep street were flooded. On account of this inconvenience it was cheaper to live at the foot of the street than at the top, but this did not mean that all the best people were at one end—a fact which nobody knew better than Willy.

  His farewell march was to take him from the top of the street to the bottom. Not because he lived at the top. Willy had a shack of his own, not in the street at all but set at a respectable distance outside the village. His walk was from top to bottom because that is how things are arranged in any street; you always start with the important people.

  The government men had arrived the day before to organise Willy’s sendoff. Decker stood at Willy’s side; Ponting waited at the other end of the street. The villagers were ranked three and four deep on both sides of the road so that even if Willy had wanted to dodge the parade he would have found it impossible to duck into any of the few side alleys.

  Behind Willy, marking the highest point of the village, the church clock boomed out the last stroke of noon. At his side, Decker moved his elbow imperceptibly.

  “Okay, Willy,” he said. “Let’s get it over with.”

  Orville Jace owned the biggest house in the village, number one in the street. He also owned the factory on which the village lived like a suckling infant. One way or another, Orville Jace owned the village. Anybody who did not already know this could see it in his confident stride from the double gates of his house.

  He extended a hand to Willy, put the other on a shoulder in true brotherly fashion.

  “So it’s goodbye,” he said. There was nothing in the words but the words themselves: no concealed pleasure, no feigned regret.

  Willy was facing into the sunshine. He squinted.

  “That’s right, Mr. Jace. Fifty years I’ve been here and now it’s time to go. You’re one of the few people who have known me all those years. Not many remember my coming.”

  Jace put on a fat smile. The villagers would remember this day. They would remember the next hour in particular; they would remember it in every detail; they would remember how each and every person had said goodbye to Willy. Jace knew they were watching to see how he reacted. Behind his smile nobody would have guessed at his elation—except Willy, of course, and he did not matter because Jace was so complacent he did not care what Willy thought.

  “I was only a boy,” he said. He looked around, giving his smile to the onlookers so that they should know that Orville Jace was just like any one of them; he too had been a boy.

  Willy said, “A rude one, Mr. Jace. You sure were a rude little boy.”

  Jace thumbed his nose and the fat smile, unfaltering, went up one side of his mouth.

  “Now, Willy, you’re showing up my past to all these good people! Still, I don’t deny it. I guess I called you just as many names as all the other kids did. After all, you must admit—”

  “Sure. No offence meant, Mr. Jace. You were no different. Forget it.”

  “But I don’t want to forget it. I’m proud to think that I, who was once one of the worst offenders against good manners, one of the loudest advocates against your presence, was also one of the first to accept you as an ordinary person.”

  Willy looked down to avoid the sun’s glare. “I remember,” he said, quietly. “That was after your father died. You had inherited the factory. And I suggested switching the layout to concentrate on printed circuits.”

  “Quite.” Orville Jace’s smile was on automatic control. It might have broken down otherwise. “Well, I mustn’t keep you, mustn’t monopolise you—”

  Willy was not playing according to the social rules today. He retained Jace’s hand while he finished what he had been saying.

  “You didn’t believe me when I said printed circuits were to be the thing. You lost out for two years running when your rivals were eating into your share of the market. Yet you could have had twelve months start on them. If you had believed me, it could have been you that ate into their market.”

  “How was I to know? You weren’t in the business. I ask you—an outsider suddenly predicts what’s going to happen tomorrow—who’s going to risk his living, not to mention the living of all the good people whose welfare depends on him, on a thing like that?”

  Jace hitched up his smile and showed it around again. He thought that bit about the workers’ welfare was go
od.

  “Don’t forget,” he went on. “Don’t forget I didn’t hesitate when you said to drop radio and television in favour of ballistic computers. I didn’t hesitate when you predicted the government would be contracting for computers twelve months later. And I have never hesitated since, not once. As I said, I was one of the first to accept you. Whatever you advised, I did.”

  Willy had not intended baiting him and now he was tired of it. He could have told Jace he had grown fat on the advice he had accepted. Or he could have countered everything by telling him he knew who had organised the Vigilance Committee responsible for his sendoff. Instead, he simply nodded, released Jace’s hand and moved down the street.

  For the next two hundred yards his walk was a solemn procession. He crossed from one sidewalk to the other, exchanging a few words of farewell with as many people as possible.

  But he was hurrying because most of the people were friends of Jace or executives employed by Jace; for one reason or another they took their lead from Jace and Willy cared as little for them as they did for him.

  He slowed down when he came to the school. It was a long low glass-walled building, set back from the street. It was fronted by a railed-off oval of grass with a marble memorial to the ‘Glorious Dead’ in the centre background. On each side of the monolith there was a green rest-bench, endowed in the past by Orville Jace’s father.

  At the moment the grass was invisible beneath an orderly mass of children, all scrubbed and in their best attire as if it was the day of the annual school photograph. Even the scars of generations of initials carved on the benches were hidden; one bench held the white-bloused female teaching staff, the other was adorned by Warren, Digman, Page and Abbott—known respectively and disrespectfully to their pupils as Warhorse, Digger, Fatso and The Monk.

  The head of the school took two steps forward to shake Willy’s hand and to act as spokesman for teachers and pupils.

  “On behalf—” he started.

  Willy walked round him. “Hi, kids,” he said hopefully.

  But they had been too well drilled. Their behaviour was impeccable, exactly as Kyle, the headmaster, had demanded. A few small faces creased in the beginnings of a grin, a few others twisted in ugly adult disdain.

  Willy’s shoulders sagged. He had hoped for something better from this generation. After all, it was fifty years now. He was no longer a freak or novelty. The days were gone when he had been openly shouted at. Yet the antagonism was as strong as ever, freshly renewed in each generation by the preceding one.

  Impossibly late as it was to effect any change. Willy felt compelled to try.

  “What do you tell them?” he asked Kyle. “Do you just say I am an android or do you tell them, as you used to tell me, that I am the spawn of the ungodly, worse than a bastard because even he has parents?”

  Kyle took off his glasses, examined the lenses and replaced them. Willy thought: still the same old Kyle, still having to go through some minute distracting ritual while he rallied his small courage to speak.

  “Mind your language in front of the children,” he whispered to Willy.

  “You mean don’t talk so loud that they can hear my opinion of you? Don’t worry, Kyle. I only wanted to know why you tell them these things.”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Kyle sounded bitter. “We have to spend the first eighteen years of our lives being educated, being taught the things you assimilated in a tenth of that time.”

  “You’re forgetting. I was the equivalent of twenty years old when I came out of the vat. I looked twenty so they said that was my nominal age. I suppose learning came easier because I was born mature.”

  “Born!”

  Willy apologised. “That slipped out. Technically speaking, I was—”

  “That’s right, show off. Show how much more than me you know, even though I went to university.”

  “Goodbye, Kyle.” Willy cut the conversation short. He had learned at least some part of the reason for Kyle’s antagonism.

  He had known that he had never been completely accepted for a variety of reasons, each of which were now being confirmed. Yet on this last day he had expected some show of regret at his going, perhaps even a request to stay.

  But behind the mass display of mild regret, there was a rock-hard core of decision: this was his sendoff, there was to be no recall.

  With the older ones it was a case of fear. Willy had been placed among them in the days when an android was something new, something of unknown potentialities. And his omniscience, his uncanny ability to assess a mass of random factors and predict a future event only substantiated their suspicions.

  With those aged between thirty and fifty the cause of their antagonism was injured pride, the ever-present knowledge that anything they could do, he could do better. He had tried hard not to do things better than the norm, but it seemed as if his potential alone was enough to mark him as an outsider.

  The young were impressionable and the teachings of their elders outweighed the evidence of their experience. They knew Willy was a nice guy to talk to, friendly, harmless, entertaining. But they had been told of the stigma underneath his affability and wisdom. So they were silent behind their regimented cheering.

  Halfway down the street there was a break in the terraced houses. One side of the street was gay with the striped sun-blinds above shop windows. Opposite the dozen shops, the street parted into a wide asphalted avenue leading to the factory, whose workers had been given an extra hour’s lunch break so that they might fill the avenue to witness Willy’s sendoff.

  Willy did not feel up to dealing with any more massed humanity. He purposely moved to the side of the street which had the shops.

  He was not surprised when Viner took his hand eagerly and made earnest conversation. Viner’s store was the largest of the group. Proprietor and store had grown fat together. Viner would probably die of fatty degeneration of the liver within a couple of years, but that was the sort of prediction Willy had understandably avoided making.

  “Something I want to ask you before you go, Willy. Remember you said this was going to be a big town pretty soon?” Willy nodded.

  “How soon, Willy? Two years? Four—five? I’ve had the chance to take an option on this whole block of property. I was thinking about a supermarket. But it would take a lot of money. I would have to borrow heavily. I wouldn’t like to risk that unless I knew exactly—”

  “Exactly?”

  “Well, you know, approximately exactly.”

  “More than two years, Viner.”

  “How much more?”

  “I couldn’t really say. I need more facts, need to see how the trends continue. If I was here another six months I could tell you. But I won’t be here, will I?”

  Willy had put hope aside when he asked, “You’d like it if I stayed, eh?”

  “Sure. Sure, I’ve got nothing against you, nothing at all.”

  “Did you stand up and say so at the last meeting of the Vigilance Committee?”

  “Aw, now, Willy—you’re not being realistic. I’ve got a business to think about.”

  “But you personally wouldn’t mind if I didn’t have to leave today?”

  “Not a bit.”

  “Not even if I was only a simple android, if I had no talents, if I couldn’t tell you when to start converting your store to a supermarket?”

  Viner licked his lips. He said, “You can stay for me.” It came out in a strangled gulp and Willy knew he was lying.

  “Sorry,” he said. “It’s too late now. You’ve been overruled.”

  At his side, Decker whispered, “Speed it up, Willy. We’re supposed to be out of here before one.” And Willy took leave of Viner without regrets.

  The tone of the street went down rapidly with the gradient. From here on, right down to the bottom where Ponting waited, the houses were older. Even the people who stood outside them had an older look about them. It was as if living at the bottom automatically put you ten years nearer your allotte
d span.

  Yet the smiles and the shouts were more genuine. Of all the people Willy had helped, these were the ones who most appreciated it.

  There was Janie Stout, ninety if she was a day—though she would never admit to more than eighty. She had been the same back at the time of Willy’s arrival; thirty years declared when everybody knew she was forty and would never see forty-one.

  The guess at her age had been correct but the gloomy forecast had come unstuck. That had been Willy’s doing.

  It was just about the very first display of his uncanny powers. Then, Janie had been a spinster. Her age was truly troubling her, in the way it troubles a woman of forty, especially the single ones.

  The neighbours could hear Janie crying out every night. They knew something would have to snap. The popular guess was that she would choose the gas oven. There was no callousness in their discussion of Janie. They had every sympathy for her. They knew her trials were great; there were the blinding headaches that made her cry and the terrible moods of depression that gave birth to the forecast. And there was nothing much the doctors could do, because the root of Janie’s trouble was in her head.

  As Willy stood now and let Janie’s babbling reminiscences flow over him, he thought it was funny how the prediction he had made fifty years ago had been the one and only occasion on which he had pretended to foresight.

  He had told Janie the headaches would end within a week, that she would meet a man soon afterwards who would become her husband and that she would have a child. And the sheer unlikeliness of it all was just the thing to shake Janie out of her hysterical rut. She got so intent in prettying herself up she forgot to have depressions—and without the black moods she seemed to bloom again with youth so that Joe Stout who came to the village for work at the factory found a job and a wife too.

  “But I’ll never forgive you for the rest of it, Willy.” Janie’s words came into focus.

  Willy hung his head. He knew what was coming.

  “It wasn’t right. Not at our age. We wouldn’t have tried if you hadn’t said I would have a baby. You forgot to tell me it would be queer! I’m glad you’re going away, I’m glad. Interfering in things like that—”